Having kids changes everything, of course, but for the writer, used to working in quiet solitude, it can feel like the end. Jessica Francis Kane writes about how she learned to write again, in a new way, after having children and offers some tips for new parents who write.
On Writing While Parenting
The Book of a Young Girl
Anne Frank’s copy of Grimm’s Fairy Tales is up for auction, including her signature on the book’s flyleaf. “This book really is the springboard from which her nascent literary career and dreams of being a writer were launched,” said Nicholas Lowry, president of Swann Auction Galleries.
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Uncanny Valley
“I was performing an experiment. I wanted to see [how] one of the greatest minds in history would be affected by an experience he had never had before: imbibing a suitable dose of clinical LSD in a desert setting of great magnificence, and then adding to that various kinds of entertainment.” An oral account of a 1975 trip to Death Valley with Michel Foucault.
2666: The Movie?
JW McCormack has some Notes Toward [A Potential] Film Adaptation of Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 up at The American Reader. As somebody who can’t even fathom making Cormac McCarthy’s decidedly less brutal (although still unimaginably brutal in its own way) Blood Meridian into a film, let me tell you: the idea of turning 2666 into a theater-ready motion picture seems impossible. (P.S. You really should just read both of those books…)
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The Inmates Have Taken Over
“Summer morning is risen / and to even it wends / and still I’m in prison / without any friends.” Start your Monday off right with this piece from The Paris Review on John Clare, Christopher Smart, and the poetry of the asylum. Speaking of the madhouse, here’s a piece on Anne Sexton and her book Transformations.
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Su Hui’s Masterpiece Palindrome
Chinese poet Su Hui composed an 841-character array in the fourth century that can be read forward, backward, horizontally, diagonally, and vertically. The poem, entitled “Xuanji Tu,” can be read in 2,848 different ways as a result.
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Capturing Appalachia
“Of all the work produced from this region no one observer gets the place or the people completely right,” Rob Amberg writes about his 40 years spent photographing Appalachia. His photo essay “Up the Creek” is part of The Oxford American’s “Portraying Appalachia” Symposium.
Celtic Tiger’s Collapse
Gabriel O’Malley‘s “Letter From Dublin” for n+1 is an interesting primer on the current state of Ireland following the collapse of the Celtic Tiger.
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